How to Draw with Organic Forms

1. Introduction to the Class: Hello, everyone, welcome to my class, how to draw organic forms. So in this class, I'm going to first start you with some basic exercises. We're going to draw prisms, boxes, cylinders, things like that, and then we're going to get into twisting and contorting the boxes. And this is basically to allow us to practice loosening up and thinking of these things in a more malleable manner with a sense of elasticity. Then once we go from there, we'll get into some more organic versions, and this really is the most relatable to what we're going to be utilizing in this class, but it really applies to so many things. Things that we draw in nature and in life are generally going to have more organic features. So for your class project, we're going to draw flour and so lots of organic aspects to something like this, and we'll allow you to basically utilize what I've taught you in this class thus far. I'll also be showing you how to apply texture and line variation and line weight, things like that, and why the texture itself also needs to follow these rules of uh, form and volume and thinking organically as we do that. I'll also show you how to color it. So I hope that basically this gives you a nice finished piece of artwork that you can be proud of and share, and I'd love to see what you come up with. So I hope you're excited to get started. I'm here if you have any questions. Good luck with the art, and bye for now. 2. Drawing Basic Forms: Alright, welcome back. So now what I want to talk about is getting better at form and volume. To me, this applies to so many things that we draw, if not everything that we draw. But some people like to just jump into lines and draw things out, and, you know, they get pretty good at that. I think I spent a lot of my time doing that, as well. But every time I go back to some of the basics and practice form and volume, I feel like it's something I need to do more and more. So I want to share that with you. Essentially, if you were to take just two ovals, and connect them with two lines, you've created a cylinder, right? And that is implied form and volume. So obviously, we can take this a lot further, but this is really the start of it. And what I'd like you to do is just practice this basic concept over and over. This is really a great way to warm up for the day. Again, I usually don't stop here. I usually, you know, I'll be showing you a few different ways to imply these various concepts. But again, for a very simplistic starting point, two circles, two ovals, whatever you want to call, you know, if they're slanted, they're ovals right. And then two lines. And you can take that and place it all over the page with varying degrees of taper. Now, some of them will feel like they're moving away in perspective. In this case, it doesn't. It actually just feels like a cup or something like that falling over. But if you were to turn this another way, so something like this and like this, and there it starts to feel like it's receding away from our view. So this is a great way to practice a sense of perspective. And really, there's all sorts of things that this can do for you. Once you feel comfortable doing this over and over and just moving these around, the next step that I would recommend is finding a center. And this can be a guesstimation, okay? So it doesn't need to be a perfect center, but just practice finding a center and drawing another disc through there. In fact, to be honest, I'm sorely off on that one. Let me move that over just a little bit. Even though it doesn't need to be perfect. But there we go. So now we have a center and also a center line this way. Okay? So I like doing both of those. You'll see these come in handy quite a bit. So when you put these lines through the middle of your form or volume, they're called wrapping lines, and they do so much for perceiving depth on the page. Again, another great thing to practice. And so if we take something like this, we go to here, again connect these two lines. Find an approximate center. Now, something to practice here, and I'll show you some ways to actually map this out. But something to practice here is trying to push that center disc or oval or wrapping line back further distance wise than what you would perceive as center if you were to take a straight measurement and cut it in half. And you see I've actually made that mistake. But once you start to learn more about perspective and play with it more and more, you'll realize that when something tapers this far, so you're taking the width of this, going to here, width of this, going to here, and then relating the taper of the lines. Okay. And once you go diagonally from corner to corner, you'll find the center is back further than you would have guessed. And I've been doing this a long time, and I'm obviously still needing to practice this, right? You know, I'm pretty far off. And so, but that's the neat thing about learning perspective and also the neat thing about doing this in a more free hand method, where you're just basically saying, You know what? I could rule out every line. I could draw vanishing points and get into all the perspective stuff. And there's a time and place for that, obviously. But this time, I'm just going to see where I'm at. You know, if I was to guess, where would I be? You know, how far off would I be? I think that's another part of, you know, just kind of exploring our art as to see what decisions we make when we take all the rules away or all the guides or rulers and things like that, digital tools, you know, just to see what you can come up with. So, again, this is just that exercise to practice basic forms and volumes. Now, some other ones that we're going to be playing around with, obviously a lot is just taking a basic square and same concept, drawing some implied depth perception. So just taking those lines and receding them backwards, maybe a little bit of convergence, you know, they're kind of pulling together. Like you know, you're envisioning a vanishing point way back there somewhere. So you can play around with that. Sometimes if you taper it too much, it'll look oddly distorted. So just see what you can come up with there. And then, again, you could even get in here and draw a couple center lines. Again, it's just good practice. And also with this, obviously take some that are maybe skinnier, rectangular like prisms. Use those wrapping lines to find center and even something like that. Also, don't be afraid to tilt them in a kind of a slightly odd perspective. You know, something falling over, leaning over, something like that. This is just a great way to sort of doodle and log in some practice that really will pay dividends over time. So another one is so we've got the cylinder. We've got the box like prism. We've got wrapping lines to practice here. Another technique that you'll see artists do is they'll draw a rectangular prism or I'll say a rectangular plane, actually, through the center of this. So if you want to take it a level further, you can definitely do this. And what's kind of neat about this one is it gives you another floating shape in there to look at that does convey a pretty good amount of sense of dimension, right? It makes that a three dimensional see through cylinder. It becomes more apparent because of this shape in here. And just keep in mind, the real simple way to perceive this is I'm going to put a line here, and that same line is going to go over here just smaller, and then I'm going to connect those together. All right. So it's the same angle on the ends, and one's just naturally smaller based upon the way that it's inside this cylinder. So this cylinder, I kind of like these egg like shapes, right? So I'm going to just go right through the middle like here. Same angle. I'm bring this line to here, this line to here. There we go. So again, just another way to play around these and add more perceived depth and dimension to it. So the other one is just taking circles. And you'll see this used for head drawing, right, like the Androlumus method. So you take a circle, find a center, find a center this way. And you can draw all the way through. That helps you. And I apparently need some practice. My circle looks pretty bad here or my globe or sphere now at this point. And then you can mark a center point like this. A lot of times you'll see the artists do something like this. So they're just trying to show that direction and that orientation. And then for the Ailums method, you slice off the sides, right? So that's another thing that you can do. You can put that disc on the side. If you're practicing head shapes, you'll draw a bunch of these and move around the orientation of the center line and then also cut off the sides for that head like shape. So again, same thing, practice these and maneuver them all the way every conceivable angle. If you really want to get good at this, a lot of times I'll do mine more like this where I'll just draw the perimeter lines. But again, if you want, you can draw through it. It does make it a bit harder, but maybe that's the reason to do it, right? I almost don't know where I would put those lines there. Yeah, so I feel like that's a bit confused. I might go back there. Yeah, I kind of like it like that. Again, that disc on the side. And you can even find center this way. And so this really is right out of the Andrew Lomas book. So go ahead and practice a few of these. Feel free to share them, and I'll take a look at them and see if I can help you with anything, but this really is about exploring your own sense of depth and dimension. So there's not a lot you can get wrong here. In fact, don't ever think you can get things like this wrong. It's all about logging in volume, and sheer repetition will just make you better and better. And again, if nothing else, you get a great sense of perspective and hand eye coordination. So let's move on to the next lesson. A 3. Bending the Forms: And welcome back. So for this next one, I'd like to talk about curving some of these forms and volumes, bending them. We'll get into twisting them, stuff like that. So essentially, if you were to take a box or a rectangular like prism, and just try to bend it, right? So now you start to get into something that is more it's slightly more organic. I mean, obviously, not very organic because it's a box like shape. But this bend, you know, these are your organic lines, right? And they start to have a sense of anatomy or a sense of being alive, you know, you'll see when people animate a simple box in a three D cartoon or whatever, and the box is jumping around, this is how they do it. They start to bend it. If the box was very solid, like this. And they just took it, and I'm just going to do a fake little animation here. And they just went like this. And it does look alive a little bit because it's a moving box, right? But not nearly as much as if it started to bend and twist and contort, especially if it was done in a way that looked like human movement or movement of an animal that we're used to or whatever, just some organic movement. So anyways, just bending these prisms like this can be very beneficial. So again, I like to always find center. You could draw through this as well. Like, I would keep the lines very light. We'll talk a little bit about that. Like there are benefits to that for some things. I feel like things like this will get a little too confusing. So I'm not going to worry about that. We'll just stick to the superficial, you know, the outside of the forms right now. But again, this is something that is very powerful for now transitioning from stiff, lifeless characters to something that gives you a sense of perspective because some of us need that, right? It's like you form and volume, and it helps you with a sense of where things go. So an implied perspective, not just through the body, but in this case, it's really what I'm thinking about. It's like, Well, if we had a little bit of bend to the character, but, you know, still had trouble aligning things. Well, that's where techniques like this really pay off because they give you that sense of perspective, that ability to map center lines, it's very parent. I'm not saying every single time your center lines are going to be 100% correct, you know, but it's a lot more discernible than just, you know, throwing lines over a blank white canvas, right? You're basically mapping things in a more geometric way. But again, you can introduce a little bit of this curve, and now it's got at least a little bit of of an organic feeling to it. Probably could have pushed that one a bit further. And that coupled with the fact that you're going to add maybe a segment for the upper body, segment for the lower body, and you really piece it all out. Then you can take that as far as you need to. So again, play around with this, just throw in some curves, connect them all together. Get that implied perspective in there. Now, as this bends down and away from our view, we would need to put the receding line up higher on the curve here to make that work. Get that idea of a center line in there. I seem to keep struggling with that. So I don't feel bad. I've done this a lot, and I'm still trying to figure it out. So there we go. Something like that. And you could refine these and make these nice and clean. I don't think that's really necessary. I would rather see you create more volume. And keep in mind, too, you could add more wrapping lines as well. You know, if it helps you out, especially if it aligns to something you're going to need to draw anyways, then by all means, you know, there's no set of rules as far as, like, how many you might add. You know, I guess you'd use them just as much as you need to. And so, after you've done a few of these, let's take these over a little bit. And let me try one more with a little bit more distortion. I feel like these are all a bit safe. Let's try one where we really try to expand one side versus the other. So that's another neat thing about something like this. You can really dramatize it a bit, make it look a little more interesting. Something like this. And we can add a couple more wrapping lines if we think it'll help. There we go. So now we've got something that it looks like we're looking up at it and it looks like it's, you know, receding away from us into space. So the next step from something like this that I like to practice and like, you know, get you to practice so that you can start drawing things more again, organically, but with a sense of form, form, and structure is to twist this particular type of shape, or form. So basically, if you take I guess one good way to try this is to pick the plane that you want to see first, okay? So I'm going to pick the top plane of what I'm trying to visualize here. And this could be any number of ways, right? It could be this way. It could be this way, right? You could tilt it anyway you want, and you're going to have to do that to really get a sense for, you know, what your end result is Like you're going to have to try different starting points to go, Oh, okay, so if I move it this way, I do get this weird kind of pinching here, but I didn't want that. So it's a little bit of it's almost abstract at first, but then you start to realize what gives you the end result you're after. So, for instance, um if I take this now and I say, Okay, I want to curve this, I have to think about how or twist this, I should say. These are the curves and bends. I want to do more than that. I want to twist it. So I got to look at maybe one of these planes and go, Okay, if I turn this plane, something like this, and then I wanted to see the back of this a bit, right? I might do something like this, and that should tell me where this line should be. So at first, my inclination was to put it like that. And that might be not that far off. Let me move it this way and see. Yeah, I feel like I feel like this actually would be better. So what we're trying to do is think about that next bottom plane that you're not seeing, though, because it's turning away from us, right? So now this gives us the front plane, and we realize, Oh, if I was to connect this down to here, it would disappear through this. In fact, it would probably just fade off like this. And again, this might not be correct. We're making this up as we go, in a sense, but with more and more practice, it starts to look better and better. It starts to read better and better. The thing that I just want to try to hopefully to get you see here is that it really is about picturing where each one of these planes go and then piecing it together. At least that's the way my mind works with it. If I try to just draw this shape, it's a lot harder for me. I mean, I might be able to get it. I've drawn enough of these. I should be able to get but that's not what works better in my mind to kind of process this. It's better to think about one particular plane, then the next neighboring plane, and how that might appear from this angle. And then on and on. It's like, you know, I always tell people, most of the drawings I do are like puzzles to me, and that's how I work through them. So let's try it again. Let's try to bring this plane down. And actually, let me take it a bit further. So this is going to be the top plane. I'm actually going to taper it as well, so I don't draw it too evenly, like, you know, flat rectangle there. And then I want to think about the next plane change, and I really want this to sort of bend in front of itself and back over this way. So, see, this is where it gets tricky because I might have to come back to this area. So I'm going to go to this plane change now. I say, Well, if it did fold and bend back towards us a bit, you know, it would probably squeeze in a little bit, probably widen back out. And then we get some of this bottom plane, I don't feel like it could I mean, it could be whatever we want, but I feel like that's a bit much. So what I want to do is taper it this way. And then I have to figure out, Okay, what does this do here? Is this like a belly to it? Is it folded? Again, I really trying to imagine the torso of a character or, you know, when you draw the torso using the bean shape method, you do this bean bag type thing. I'm sort of considering it like that. I'm thinking of that anyways. So something like that. But I didn't get much twist, you know? So I got this bend and fold, but not a whole lot of twist. So let me try another one.'s race these lines back. But I actually like this still. I feel like this is a useful useful one. Let's do the center line. I mean, I feel like they're all useful. It's all good food for thought. I like that. Yeah, let's go ahead and do one more. Okay, so for this next one, I want to try a variation from anything I've got so far. So let's bring this one over to here. Or let's tilt this one. More like this. For a start. And again, I want to twist this. So how would we go about that? So one way you could do it, as well, is you just take the opposing shape. So let's try that. It's probably good to practice a few this way anyways first. And so what you do is you connect this to here, this to here, a couple of curves. This might be a bit much, but we're going to go for it. And then as far as these two, let's see if I can relate them this way. Is it too much? And then we would take this and try to figure out where these areas fade off. So let's erase all this back. I go to see this line. A bit much. It might be a bit too much, but I feel like this would need to go right back to there. Yeah, this one feels a bit forced. I'm going to try one more because although I'm going after this twisting effect, there's a certain part where it just feels forced and stretched and a bit odd. Almost, again, like an abstract idea, which is fine for practice, but it's knowing those limits when we try to apply it to certain things, like, say, a torso of a body. Okay, let's go ahead and try one more. And so with this one, let's start with the side plane. So basically, if you picture this side plane over here, let's start with that first. And I really do feel like this particular kind of exercise does require more practice, but all the more reason to squeeze it into our daily activities, right? If we find it challenging, there's probably a lot we can learn from it. So I'm going to start with this side. I'm trying to bend it over to where I want to get one where we see a little bit of both sides. So it is kind of a tricky bit of balance because generally, when you start to uh, see a lot of the one side, you're not going to see much of the other. But that's the whole purpose of twisting things. We want to be able to see how we can push that. So I'm going to establish this plane change here. And as I bring this up to here, I got to be careful not to do something like this because then we're not going to see that other side up here. So I'm going to add this little sliver this little sliver right here, and it feels kind of awkward to bring it down to this line, but I guess it would have to do something like that. And then from here, we almost picture, if we were to draw through or do something like that, it'll actually be this side, like that. So we'll just envision that and then we'll add this line right here. And just to sort of check the work, I'm just gonna draw over it one more time and add the wrapping lines. So try to practice a variety of these, get some comfort with this bit of exercise. And let me see what you come up with. And with that, let's head over to our next lesson. 4. Drawing Organic Forms: And welcome back. So for this next one, we're going to do something a bit more organic. So each time pushing more into that, you know, being able to think of, like, clay, ball of clay, and you're trying to maneuver it around the screen and mold it into various things. And the more you can think about that, have a sort of elasticity to your thought process and your drawing, you start to really open up the possibilities. So with this one, we're just going to draw some organic shapes. And so I like to start with just a basic bean shape. And so, something like that. And you might not even have that initial curve inside. I like to put that in there. You don't have to. And you can add to these sketches, as well. But what I want to do is first show you how by simply taking this and then adding our wrapping lines, we can really make something that looks and feels a lot more dimensional. Maybe a center line down the side. Could add a few of these. Remember, you could make this really look like a pretty tight grid if you wanted to. It's totally up to you how far you want to take these. You could add line weight and value, and these things will really start to look a lot more dimensional. So just like that, probably one right here. So just like that, we have something that now feels like it's occupying space, right? And so try this again, but then try to add as much variation. But remember, you can add to it as well, because I think that initially, it doesn't always feel very comfortable, at least for me anyways, you might have a more innate ability to do this. But for me, when I go to do this, a lot of times I'll repeat the same shapes. I mean, that's essentially that shape just bigger on one side, right? I think this one will work, though, because initially what happens is we can still convey a sense of scale. So, just let me show you, I'll start and you don't have to put the oval right there, for instance. You could start the oval here. And then as you work out, you're going to get a very different shape. An orientation of it. But I do kind of like it right there. I just want to get you to think in a couple of different directions with this stuff. But then as we bring this curve line around, you know, maybe we start to tighten it up through the middle right here. Maybe we have them get closer together in succession, so it feels like this is getting smaller and further away. So you could play around with that as well. Then we'll go from this point, kind of find a center line. And also even the center line here. If you move this, like say like this, right? You start to get a different feeling of that shape. I mean, I would say that if it did that, you might want to add to it and bring it over this way. But again, this is really just subjective, I think. You could really take this in a number of ways, and that's kind of the interesting thing about it is that you really explore what these different choices will make, and you're doing it almost instinctively because you're not looking at anything. You're just drawing from you know, your own process, basically. And just like that, again, we have something a lot more dimensional looking. Now, they can be shapes that are a lot of these shapes you're going to see in, like, nature with, like, you know, gardening, for instance, right? Fruits, vegetables. You know, you might see household decor that mimics these types of shapes, right? There's a lot of that, just kind of abstract shapes and things like that. But, again, just try to you know, just put something on the page and then add to it and transform it and maybe make it as compounding as you can. That was a pretty bad attempt. Let me try that again. So let's say Let's say something that's turning over onto itself a bit more. So I will use a little bit of that hook line right there, something like this. Let me try to change this end of it as well, because I'm just kind of repeating the same shape too much. So we can edit this shape a little bit. Because really, I don't think the point is that you have to just draw it freely without any concern of what you're getting. You eventually do want to sort of try to perceive what you might get and be okay with making edits, sketches and things like that to get what you want. So there's nothing wrong with that. So I really want to see one where the belly gets bigger, and then it thins out quite a bit. One reason what just kind of occurred to me is it starting to make me think of anatomy. So with muscles, you have a belly to the muscle, right? It gets wider in the middle, and it tapers down to the insertion and origin points. Even though that's not what I'm really per se drawing here, it just made me think, You know what? Instead of doing the same thing over here, let's make the belly of it bigger. And see how that pans out. And you see, I didn't even start with the center line. Not a big deal. I can add that at any point. There we go. Just kind of wrap these around, kind of have them rotate as they spin around to this side. And then if I wrap those away, meaning they curve away from us in this direction, then the shape goes away. But now keep in mind, if I go way back to about here and I start to straighten this out and I start to bend it backwards, look watch what happens. Now it's coming towards us. I hope it looks that way, but see it if I bring it all the way down there, it looks like it curves towards us and then back down. But again, these wrapping lines really do change the direction you're kind of implying here. If I go like this, especially if I tighten those up, it looks like it's really wrapping away and maybe even getting further away into space. You know, that's what these whenever you see lines that go like this, they start to pull closer and closer together. That implies not just a fade, but something fading away off into the distance. So a couple more of these lines this way. You could play around with these. These could space out where the belly is, and that's going to kind of reinforce that widening of that belly area. So that's probably good to do. You know, bring them tighter to the poles or the points and then widen them out where, you know, the form or the volume winds out. So I'd like to show you something else. I'm going to go ahead and take these and bring these up. And so another thing that goes really well with this that I like to think about is if you draw some organic kind of shape, say, something like this, right? And we take this and we just treat it a little bit differently to see how we can explain the form a bit differently. So I'm going to place a center line right here. Like so. And then instead of doing these rounded curvatures, which again, would make it look a little bit closer to what we have, although I did sort of do a little bit more of an angle right there, so it changes a bit even by itself. But you can see if I went like this, we would end up with something like something out of the garden, right, another vegetable. But if I take this and treat it just a little bit differently by bringing these up like this, let me get smaller over here. And then I bring them over as a curve, but not even as dramatic of a curve, more of a subtle curve. So now what we're doing here is we're actually combining a sense of plane change with an organic shape. You see that? And so, immediately now it looks more like a tongue or maybe a start of a futuristic car. They use a lot of shapes like this for car design. But essentially, that's the only difference here. It's a lot of the same roles at play, but then we just added these tinier little and I wouldn't even call these straight lines. Those are still curves. They're just not very curved. Tiny curves. And you can do that in multiple ways. You could multiply, I don't know if that's saying it right. You could angle these a couple of different times and couple that with a organic line, and you can literally, you know, chisel something out like this, right? You're just developing these plane changes. So it's good to think about that, as well. I'm going to leave that part out. I'd rather see you practice a few like this. I'll do one more like that, just to show you hopefully, you're understanding what I mean here, but it essentially just another way to control these organic shapes and come up with some good ideas, essentially, in control with your work. So that's really what a lot of this is. You want to be able to control all sorts of ideas as you create these shapes. So I'll just draw another organic shape, maybe an extra bend in there. And this one will make it look even, you know, just really soft overall. Again, obviously, I could take that like this, and it would look even softer. You know, I can almost picture that like liquid, you know, in low gravity, right? No gravity scenarios floating through the air. But that's not what we want. So we'll take this and say, well, what if we brought a tighter plane change over to here? So there's our plane change. And then we'll just draw these little lines you know, again, they can be curved. They can definitely rotate around with the form as it passes this way or, you know, this way and this way. And then as we come up and around, we just say, Well, then we want a bit of curvature here. Now, likewise, if you made this flat, you start getting almost like a guitar like shape. Well, you know, a bent guitar, maybe a melted guitar. But you see that how it flattens it right out. So again, these wrapping lines are very powerful. Like they do a lot for explaining the form. The more I curve these, the more organic this is going to feel, I can pinch them to one side, which now starts to rotate this. So you think of, like, you know, the way you would draw a sidewalk wrapping around the street, or in this case, one wrapping around a hill. But there we go. And I really just did another floating tongue, I guess. But hopefully, it does give you some ideas other than that. And lastly, one other thing I want to show you with this. So we'll do one more, and we're going to actually, I just want to show you my thought process here. So I'm going for something that recedes away from us in space. So I'll draw it in between these lines. Okay. Maybe something like this. And then as it comes up to this area, I'll just flatten it out. I'm sort of running out of canvas anyways. And so what I want to show you here is that if we take this and just go sort of a mix of what we've been doing, I'm going to draw across with a curve and then line straight down to get that plane change. But also practice doing this right here where you just pick areas and you divide it or cut it. And again, it's another way to sort of I don't know, practice with your ability to define shapes and to create different elements that read the way that you want. So if you cut something and shadow it like that, now it's divided, I don't know, it just feels like you're another way to transform the work, and it really opens up your mind, again, in all these ways, all those possibilities of how you could draw things. And so give that a try. I think that's a pretty neat one, as well, and do a nice variety of these and see what you come up with. And let me know if you have any questions. So with that, let's move on to our next lesson. 5. Drawing a Flower: Alright, welcome back. So now let's take what we've learned thus far, use it for a project file. So for your project file, we're going to create a flower and talk about how the same aspects can be interpreted here and applied here. So essentially, if you start with petal, leaf or something like that, you're going to draw something pretty organic, right? There's going to be asymmetrical value to it. It might appear relatively symmetrical, but generally, you're going to give it a little bit of asymmetry. And then also you're going to do a similar thing in what we've been doing, and that's finding a center line. You're going to want to make sure that center line explains the underlying form, but also that it's not too awfully centered to your view. So we want to give the illusion of depth, right? So we're moving that up and over. If we went like this, it would flatten it right out, right? So we give basically that wrapping line right through the middle then some you're going to go like this. You could really consider those I don't know if they're called veins. I always refer to them as veins, but you could really look at these like wrapping lines as well. And so if you go to put one in place, and it essentially flattens out or propels the underlying form into a direction that doesn't sense, then chances are it might be a little bit wrong. And I hate using the word wrong in art, but you might want to adjust it. So what I would say to explain the form is something like this, maybe switch that over like that, maybe like this. And I'll play around with those a little bit just to see you know how I can really push and get more out of that underlying form. Now, if it's a petal that doesn't have those types of marks, you know, some just, you know, have more of a center line, and some have some texturing that go a little bit more like this. But same concept. These would be lines that can still help to explain the belly, I'll call it, of the volume by making sure that they sprawl out as they reach that belly versus making them all go the same direction like this, how it kind of fights the look of it a little bit. Like, it's not helping to explain that volume as well. So I'll do something like this. Obviously, we also have line weight. I didn't really talk a lot about this one, but I talk about it in other lessons, but just remember that line weight, there's a couple ideas of it where things that are closer will have a heavier line and where the curvature of the form bows out is usually another good spot to put it. But some people even utilize a rule of, well, I don't care where it's at as long as I keep going thick, thin, thick, thin, all the way around the artwork, and they'll even stop it and start it as well. Like, so I've seen a lot of different artists utilize it various ways, and everyone has their own specific variation somewhere along the line. So what we'll do is we'll also rotate these petals around the center point. So even though we're going to think about the same sort of petal, like, a lot of flowers, the petals and the leaves are just repetitive, right? But there's a lot of variation, even though they're sort of shaped the same. So even obviously the direction that we're trying to imply of them. So even though I'm going to start with this, you know, big curve here, maybe taper it back in, and I could think about it flattening out because it's going away from our view, right? So, something like that, I'll widen it out to here, I like to make sure it looks a little bit asymmetrical. You know, just remember, asymmetry is just being different from one side to the other across the center line. I nature, that happens, I would say probably always get another word I don't like using in art, but I'm pretty sure in nature, everything's asymmetrical. When you get close enough, like when you really study it to a, you know, very close degree or small degree. But with this one, same thing. I'm going to direct it differently. I'm going to try to show more curvature and size variation here. Overall, I'm thinking the same shape organically, but I want that sense of variation. I can also vary up the center line, right? I could have it go more curved here, which makes a little bit of sense and then flatten it out. Maybe even bow it differently right there, and then a more extreme curve there. And again, now this petal starts to look, you know, quite different to that one, right? But I like that. I want there to be enough continuity where you know it's, you know, the same petal, hopefully. But I want there to be enough variation where it feels organic. It feels like it's something you would see in nature. So one over here, to try to rotate this one. You know, petals can fold quite dramatically, right? So I'm going to try to show the bottom edge of this one. And I do that by putting this line as a bit of an edge direction right there, and then I fold that lower part. So really, in this one, I'm thinking more about plane changes, right? And then I can get that center line in there, which helps me to check to make sure it reads well. Also, another thing I can do is as this really curves over, I can add another curve right here because if this has any sort of so perceive that we're talking now about the depth that goes like this. So I'm going to do a wrapping line right through the middle. It's going to bow down into this creased area back up and around. This would be the peak or precipice or what's the word? Highest point Apex, apex to that area, and then you go back down to the side, right? So that's the height in the curvature I'm thinking about. Well, as I get over to the smaller leaf off to the side, if it does bend down and away from our view, it stands to reason that this area becomes very apparent. Again, the con I always get these backwards. One is concave, one is convex, one means high, one means low. Sorry, I should know that one, but just check it. But again, we'll go to Apex here. Apex there, and then indentation or crease, you know, there. So as it turns away from our view, that becomes more apparent, right? So again, that's why I'm trying to show that right there. Now, this leaf or petal really could be a lot bigger. Now, but I don't know, there is a size variation that we want, as well. And then we can texturize that. Again, these are sort of like two fold. They're wrapping lines, and they're a bit of texturing at this point. So I can explain the again, belly of this volume by widening those out and then constricting those to the endpoints or poles or whatever you want to call it. And you can really play around that. Now, as well, this part and what I said here, this part is rolling away from us. So we might want to get a little bit more of that little Boeing effect right there. I don't know if I want to try to force the edge of the petal right there. I think that if I went for that, I don't think it's a bad decision. I feel like maybe it needs to be a little bit bigger. Like, you another thing sometimes is you got to decide if you're going to do something, if it's going to read poorly, it generally means you have to push it further or get rid of it. So sometimes being on the fence with a particular design choice can can kind of hurt the illustration. Just think about it in terms of if something doesn't make a lot of sense to the viewer, then is it really necessary because it might just confuse them, right? So you want to be very articulate in your illustrative process, I guess. You want it to make sense. And so if it doesn't, looks a bit confusing to you. It might look confusing to the viewer, and generally, you'll know, because if you're unsure of what you're doing, generally, that's going to show through in the work. It just means you need to study a little bit more in that area. So again, these texture lines, I'm also trying to rotate these around the form doesn't exactly feel as comfortable in this particular area, but I'm trying to, if nothing else, be consistent from each area. So yeah, it does feel awkward. It's probably just the mechanics of my own hand. This area, I would put into shadow. So I'll just go and add a little bit of rendering here, a little bit of rendering here. And I think we might want to add one right here, just looking for this negative space and trying to fill it in. And so now I feel like I'm starting to get a bit more comfortable with the shapes. And then it's kind of hard to not want to add more when you do feel that way, it's like, Oh, I see where it's going. I'm enjoying the process. I'll just go crazy with it. But I think these two should be enough. And I also want to make sure to add, you know, just little bits of shadow. To make sure that they feel like they're behind these bigger petals. So cast shadows generally will take on the shape of the neighboring area can be a little bit deceiving based upon where the light source might be, but I'm going to keep it pretty simple. Just fill this in with some rendering. And again, texturize it. Now, you could also texturize or texture it more heavily in that indented area, so that recessed area to the petal. Remember the middle where the center line is. So you could help to convey that even further if you start rendering a bit more dense in this middle area. And then as you reach this apex to that petal, you would lighten up, right? So it's another way to imply the underlying volume with your rendering. Same thing. You could go to the edge, especially if you feel like it's more on a shadow side, and you could just render some of these little texture lines more heavily. And all the while, just keeping that wrapping line like this in mind as you do it. I don't know how much I'll get into that. I feel like I'd probably just rather color or paint this in and have some implied texture with this. And then, for the center, bring this up and out like this. So a little bit of an *** hook there. Something like that. You could texture and render off of this and we'll bring the stem down like this. So again, all of this, I'm trying to get a bit of organic feeling too, as I do this. You know, just trying to use more curves and keep everything feeling like it's moving and not too symmetrical. A little bit of shadowing here to show that it's behind the petals. You can also just add tiny little details like this and kind of block them in. I think that looks kind of nice, as well. Fills up some of that negative space. Okay, and there we go. So now we've got our base illustration to work with. And so let's go ahead and move on to the next lesson and continue to refine this. So with that, let's move on. 6. Cleaning up the Lines: Alright, welcome back. So now we'll take this and clean it up a bit, and this is really just a repeat of the process. But I like to clean it up with some nicer linework and we'll probably even go ahead and add some color to this. So what I'm going to do here is just go through and clean up the lines. Add a little bit of line weight here and there. Now, if you're trying to get really clean lines, I get this question a lot. A lot of times for something organic like this, it's a matter of putting the pen down and doing a nice steady pull, also rotating the canvas in a way that feels comfortable for you and then not overextending what your range of movement might be for your hand. So I typically can only pull a line so far across the screen before it starts to go a little crazy. I also hover my hand over the control Z. Now, if you're working traditionally, you don't have a Control Z or undo button, but you do have the ability to work on your hand eye coordination and then know where your range of movement is adequate versus, say, trying to pull way across somewhere like that. Now, I don't know. Sometimes I can do it. If it's a downward pull, I can do it. If it's a side pull, it's a little bit harder. But again, I can usually counterbalance that with not pulling a very large line. And obviously, there's tools like French Curves and other rulers that make your life a lot easier for stuff like this. And there's a lot to be said for lines being, I don't know, not so awfully crafted, you know, and perfected. It's up to you, though, as far as what style you like to see in your own work. I like to tell people I don't think there's any right or wrong to this stuff, right? It's just It's art. Make it the way you want to see it. And, you know, I can put these heavier line weights through that center. I think that works as well. Generally, for a rule for myself, if there is a rule, I generally like to put heavier lines on the outside and thinner lines for my texture lines. But that's probably more of a personal preference than a rule. And again trying to get that feeling that some lines are thicker in some areas and thinner at others just to give that variation. You can use line breaks to imply light source as well. Remember I said I wanted a little bit of a noticeable fold here. So I could probably try, let's see if it works. I probably do a little bit of a line break here. Our eyes are usually pretty good at connecting the dots, basically. Maybe bring converge them a little bit closer. I'm gonna leave that for now. I'm not a big fan of it, right at this moment, but sometimes things will grow on me a little bit. The center area. I feel like it's a little bit more like that now. It does generally need to feel like it's inside those petals. So to do that, we just want to get that the shape of the petals kind of encompassing this bulb, something like that. We can also shadow it further to reinforce that, I think. Stem. Yeah, I'm purposely trying to jag up the lines just a little bit here and there, you know, on the edges so that it doesn't I find that if I don't do that, I tend to draw leaves overly clean, then they look a little bit less believable. I again, trying to keep the interior lines thinner by comparison. Okay. Oh, I got this guy up here. Kind of high No. Okay. Something like that. And so now to texturize this a bit more, and, again, I probably don't need to do a lot of this, but I don't know. I like what it does for something like this. All I'm gonna do is rotate these lines. In the direction of the underlying volume, and then try to vary them up. I'm obviously going for something a bit thinner. But then I also want to vary these up in direction ever so slightly. So I use the word sprawl a lot. I'm trying to sprawl them outwards just a little bit. If they're too awfully straight, then we got to remember that it will tell the viewer that the underlying form is flat, and that's not what we want. We want texture without flattening it out, and then also the variation of a couple that are more heavy, you know, which could mean visibility, right? It could be Oh, that one's clearly in sight. You got to remember, broken lines, as I've already mentioned, imply light source a lot of times. So you can use that for focal points. You can use it to show all sorts of neat effects for textures. And generally, something that's too awfully even, so it doesn't have that break from light to dark in some way, it can really look quite boring. And so you see that a lot with textures. So, you know, textures can be overdone rather quickly. And I think anything that's powerful to the artwork. So I always compare adding the little highlights. I remember the first time I learned to add highlights with an airbrush in the eyes of anything character or the highlights that were glistens or glares on the end of something. And I went wild with it. And now, looking back, I could see that in the work, Wow, what was I thinking? Well, it's because the effect is so dominant and powerful. It makes the artwork kind of come alive. So it's easy to want to overdo it. So just be aware of that. And same thing with textures. And what usually happens if you apply them everywhere, the viewer's eye has nowhere to rest, right? So it actually becomes almost exhausting, or, I think, actually, the right term is really boring, but they say it exhausts the viewer's eye because they don't know where to rest their eye. So they're bouncing around. It kills the focal point. So, you know, there's a lot going on there, but when in doubt just less is more. Like, try to slowly apply your textures, and I do like iterations of the work. You'll see me do that a lot. So even putting this one flow off to the side and doing this one off to the other side, I can gauge a little bit better whether or not I'm maybe overdoing it. You know, am I making this better or worse, right? So I do these types of iterations quite a bit, which I'm sure if you follow my work, you know, that I share them a lot on my various social medias and things like that. So Well, yeah, obviously filling this in more because it's on the, you know, the away side. It's trying to show that the plane change is facing away from us more catching more shadow. Remember I had this shape as well that I need to get in there. Now, I could just tighten up these lines even further, even without filling this in completely. I could just make the texture of it a bit more dense. I think I like that. Now, one thing here, this part's kind of tricky, so I put this as a rounded shadow down, right? And that's because it matches these curves right here, okay? But the other thing to consider is that this form, this underlying form is actually going up and around a little bit. So I'm going to try this like this. And I feel like that actually makes more sense. I don't know. I guess it's I got a 50, 50 shot. I don't know if that's even the right percentage, but I'm going to go and go with that right there, but I at least wanted to explain that to you as to why I'm doing this or what I was thinking about. Remember, allow yourself to make line variations here. It usually looks more interesting, even though I think a lot of times I try to make them as clean as I can, but overly clean lines detracts away from that organic kind of feeling. And so I'm going to go ahead and rotate this a bit because mechanically, my hand just it's not feeling right. So I'm going to try to ease up on my ability. There's a time and place for testing ourselves, right? Trying to develop our hand mechanics for things that do not feel as comfortable. And then there's a time and place for saying, Okay, I've practiced that, but I really want the best of my work or or make it easier on myself to produce the work more timely and more timely manner. So I do a lot of rotating of the screen for that reason. Again, trying to consider the underlying form as I add in this bit of texture. I feel like here. I could even cross hat just a little bit. I want it to feel darker in that area. Okay, so now, let's do the larger petals. So I'm starting the texture pretty dense right here because I'm trying to perceive or convey that the distance or form is really folding away from our view. So again, texture can be a great way to help explain that. But the tricky part is as it gets up and around this, I have to soften it up, probably keep it a little more dense in the middle. But then this I would, you know, right about here I consider more the apex and where the light would be hitting. Now, another thing, we can also tighten it up here again. So you can go back and forth, and then I can lighten it up again here, and then tighten it up again here, or maybe tighten it's not the right word because they're all about the same distance. I just mean making the texture dense and less dense. So you know, more like I'm trying to imply light and curvature. Likewise, on the very edges, we could add a little bit more, gives that tiny bit of fold to the very edges, I think. Try to anyways. Okay. Let's rotate this round, see what we got. Sometimes I have to see it from a forward facing view to know if I like it. And sometimes I have to flip it to know if I did something wrong. Okay, so now this next petal here. And we'll go and stop here. We'll continue on to the next lesson. And so with that, let's move on. And 7. Adding More Texture: And welcome back. So now let's rotate again, or you don't have to rotate. This is just dependent upon if your hand feels comfortable in this direction of a pole. I imagine we all hold our pencils, pens, and styluses a bit differently. And so for me, it's always a downward pull towards the bottom of the screen that is the most comfortable. And therefore, the most, you know, feels like the most control that I have. Okay, so and one thing I do want to say about that aspect of the work, there is a time and a place for a lack of control, as well, or what I should probably say is just letting go and allowing yourself to not feel like you need tight control all the time. So one of the comparisons I like to make is when you see somebody throwing paint at a wall, and at first, it looks messy and you can't tell where they're going with it. Then towards the end, it turns into this beautiful masterpiece and very recognizable at times, you know, if they're doing, like, a portrait or something like that. And it's just amazing, right? And you kind of have to think about, well, you know, you know they had some form of control because the end of it, it's recognizable. But in the beginning, it's all energy, and it's all flow, and it's just a neat thing to look at. And it always makes me realize that for one, things that are really far back, like if you pull really far back from something, you can see a different series of steps in the picture in the process. And so sometimes it's letting go and allowing yourself to just kind of create, and then you can always tighten it up later. But what's neat is if you can hold off on tightening things up on certain projects, you'll sometimes get an actual better end result. It's really a neat experience. I like to practice going in almost blindfolded to some pieces or with no exact idea and just kind of blobbing some things down. And then I'll eventually, you know, obviously turn it into something I want to see. But it always has this organic nature to it that I don't think I get when I go in with a very strict kind of scripted idea into the process. So just something to consider. There's so many different ways to create and obviously, think about this stuff, but it is something I try to introduce more and more into my work, especially when I feel kind of stiff or Uh, a lot of times I'll feel a sense of agitation if I'm not my device or even the paper and the pencils I'm using. I don't feel as much control on a specific day. And that's when I feel like I need to tell myself, No, it's okay to just let go and make some marks and then see what we come up with. And yeah, just giving ourself a pass to not need perfection. So I probably suffer from perfectionism at some level. I think many artists do, unfortunately. So just allow yourself to create and, like, go on that if you can at times. And so obviously just more of the same. And forgive me if I feel like I or sound like I'm deviating from the source material. It's just a lot of repetitiveness here. And then I try to share other ideas that help artists along the way. So you can always let me know if you prefer that or do not. At not going to hurt my feelings. I just want to make sure I give you good quality content. And if I'm missing anything, let me know and I'll be sure to answer back and help you with that. You know, always answer anything that you didn't understand through this process. Now, another thing we can do here, and I'm actually not meaning to do this, but I'm starting to see it as I do it. Maybe you know, maybe you don't need to, but notice if I texture away from the edge of the petal, I also get a different effect. So for instance, see if I can apply that right here real quick. So if I texture along the side like this, right? That can correlate with the other texture. It's not going to be too distracting, I don't think, anyways. And then I can also even go back with a little bit of white out on the very edge. So you can see, I can imply a bit of dual light source there. So if you like that in yours, you can do that. And you can even have that come over into this side of the petal, because it's kind of boeing upright, so it makes sense that it might catch just a little bit of that light. Yeah, I think I like that. And that actually started because I accidentally did it right here. So it's funny, too, how certain things you introduce in your work, You know what? I didn't mean to do that, but I kind of like that. So maybe I'll do more of that. Those happy little accidents that Bob Ross tipped us off two years ago, right? That man was amazing. I still love watching this kind of temp. Okay, so there's that, and I feel like I could bring it up here. I kind of don't want to overdo it, but I might add it. I don't know. But I feel like I'm again, it's back to that light source thing I said of the white highlights and airbrushing or over texturing. You got to be careful that you're not just a bit entranced by the effect. And you're like, Wow, it looked good here, so it should look good everywhere. And that's not how it works. It actually starts to have diminishing returns. Okay. Because, again, we have to give the viewer's eye areas to rest. And yeah, and light sources, you know, light's not going to hit everywhere, just like shadows are not going to be everywhere. So we have to learn to be conservative with it. Okay, so now I feel like we need to render a bit of this area here, and I'll just go again with the direction of enolinFm. I don't want to render as heavily as the petals. I want there to be a little bit of variation. I can add a little bit of rendering on the side of the stem here. A little bit of rendering through here. And maybe a little bit of cross hatching here. Same thing with the petals. I can go relatively in the direction of these. Or leaves, I should say, these aren't petals, or they're leaves. Something like that. You could probably even texturize or shade each divide here because they typically, again, kind of bow a little bit outward individually, right? So you could really get in here and kind of stipple shade or whatever shading you like. So many different ways to do it. But generally, if it's a really small area, I'll get a little bit more into stipple shading versus line work, but I could always zoom in and really tighten that up as well. Okay. Let me rotate that again. Okay. So there we go. There's a little bit of shadowing for it. And so now, let me just pull back just a little bit. So I kind of like to check it from a distance and up close. And then, you know, I could continue on down this path, right? I could say, how much texture do I want? Is there enough variation in, you know, the look of it? Is Could I break up these divides to the petals by adding a little more separation this way. Does that help it? Does it hurt it? You know, things like that. Pretty simple to add to this. And then I kind of already mentioned here, but a lot of times I will go back with white out, I don't think I need to do a whole lot of that here, but it can be a nice thing to play around with because it just adds, you know, you're more likely to make some cool edits that way, I guess. I might go back and bump up the lines a little bit if I feel like I got a little too much into the cleanup of it. You know, sometimes I'll make things too overly clean and it will kill the organic kind of feeling to it. But I think overall, this is pretty decent. I would probably call this ready for color. So let's do that. We'll go ahead and stop here. We'll head over to the next lesson. I'll show you how to apply some color to this and see what we come up with. 8. Adding the Color: Welcome back. So now we will block in some color here, and I'm going to keep it pretty simple, mainly too, because I don't want anyone to feel like they have to have, you know, specific software. So a lot of times all I'm doing here is blocking in a color. It doesn't even have to be the right color. You're going to see the white out, too, because I like to actually add white out to my line work when I do that. The way I fix that is I simply turn that to multiply. So it still keeps the area that I blocked out. Sort of like you just erased it, but it did just turn that layer to black and white, which is what I want. So I'm doing is I'm adding a layer beneath it. And just painting this layer of solid color. As I mentioned, it doesn't even need to be the right color because you can change it really quickly and digital. So again, that's why I'm not getting into the software, the type. They're all the same when it comes to layers and blending modes. And if you're working traditionally, then this just means markers or whatever method you like to use watercolor, whatever is the most fun for you. So I'm just going to block in this entire area. Probably going with a bit darker of a color than I need to, but I'll soften that up. I'll lighten that up here in a bit. So obviously I could probably expediate this process with just a selection. Let's see if that makes it move a little faster here for you. I mean, I could obviously just time lapse it, as well, but then I always feel tad guilty about that. So I'm gonna zoom up here so I can select the line work a bit better, even though I still managed to go off there. Probably the point by point click was better. This one I tend to miss just a little bit, and I have to go back and clean it up. And I'm going to get rid of the pencil layer of this one, so we can see the actual linework. And you can see, now that I'm up close, my linework doesn't look the greatest. But, you know, I think that's okay. I really try not to zoom in a whole lot. I, there's definitely times I just do it. But there's other ways to fix this, so you can always get the different steps of your work in and then at the very end, do some touch ups. Or one thing I like to do is play around with softening up the lines. And again, that whiteout effect that I talked about can be a big saver here as well. But what I find is if you zoom in and scrutinize too much early on, for one, you won't complete as much work, it seems like if you're anything like me. And then, yeah, you just kind of miss out on the opportunities to fix things later on in the work, which, you know, can really come out quite nice. So yeah, be careful. Again, I think I've already mentioned it, but that perfectionist mentality, that can slow you right down to a crawl. I would wish that on no other artist. Okay, so, something like that. And then let's see what do we have here? It's a STEM. Yeah, let's just take this and add in some green. Anyhow, I'm gonna go ahead and use a click by click method just 'cause it's a little bit easier to control. Okay. Fill that out. Whoop. Color. Whoops. Here we go. And I actually find it easier to use my mouse at this point. Look at that. I still have some cleanup. Okay, so now I've got the base colors there. Let's get this part of the flower in there. We're on the very edge of the um I don't really know the anatomy of the flower, but the part that extrudes out from that area. Trying to encompass that a little bit. All right. And here, for this area, I'm going to pick something to start out with a little more of a pink. But I don't even know if that's the color I'll use. But again, it's sort of easy to maneuver from this, so I kind of start like this. So now, what I'll do is just basically add a little bit of paint work over the top. You can do this on the same layer. But essentially, yeah, I just add in a layer. And I lock it to that area, or I will just paint directly on top of it. And so what I'm looking for here is sort of the same idea as before, as far as explaining the form. So I'm actually going to use just a basic basic brush. It's just a it's really the pencil that I've been using. And I'm just going to block this in. I like the sort of texture it gives as I do this. And I'm just going to start at the highest point. So I'm going the opposite of the way I started with the texture, right? I'm looking for the apex or the light source side, which is also this little edging right there, which I can change as a color and make that look more impressive. But sort of this area right here doesn't mean I can't draw a few of these into this other area, right? I think that adds a little bit more of, you know, sort of texture that way, but I'm really starting with just this area here. And you can blend that. You can smudge it around whatever tools you want to use there. Some people just will take and go over the initial rough texture rough brush strokes with a bit of a soft brush. So the blending and the soft brush are really the same. So you can just use an airbrush to blend back and forth. I just like to be careful not to get rid of all the texture. So I like to use the blend so I can kind of find these little bits of texture that I want to leave because I don't like everything being too overly soft. So I'll repeat this part of the process. And again, starting at relatively the highest point. Also, the light source side on the very edge. Now, keep in mind if your software supports clipping mask, I can't actually go outside of it. So I'm clipping to that layer. But again, the other way is just practicing the paint workork on the actual layer. This isn't a very complex piece, right? So it really doesn't require multiple layers. I'm just kind of used to the clipping mask process. But all the software support that I use anyways. I would assume all of them at this point. It's a very handy feature because it basically clips the color to the underlying layer, which in case, in this case, is just the red. So I can't accidentally go outside of it. But again, just applying the texture more heavily in the apex or center of this petal breaking it off as it goes into the recessed area and as it curves away from the light, and I'll just go and do that to each area. You can make the brush a lot bigger. Probably makes more sense, actually. Just start with a big brush right through the middle. All right. Each of these areas. And then decrease the brush size and either overlap to get the lighter points or break it off into these curves. A little bit down here, I think. Okay. And then also probably a little bit lighter, just a little bit on the very bottom of this. Not much, though, but a little bit lighter version right through here. And you can really do this part at the end. But I like having this a little bit of variation. I probably need to blend first before I do this, but throw it in here regardless while I'm here. I kind of go back and forth from blending and adding these effects anyway, so now I'm back to lending some of this bumpiness out of there, but not all of it because I want to keep some of that feeling of texture in there. Also play around with the sizing of the blending brush if you're smudging around like I am. Likewise, with the soft brush, you can get a lot done with a soft brush. If you scale it down far enough, it becomes a hard brush, right? Like, so you might glance over big areas to soften them up. But, you know, again, just try to vary up that brush sizing to see what you can get in the way of variation and not, you know, if you keep the soft brush the same size too long, everything will have the same effect. And again, it pretty much as a general rule that if everything is too similar all throughout any part of a piece, it starts to look a little boring. So you have to again, always explore these ways that you can create variation and be aware of that as you're creating the piece. Okay, so now I feel like that's enough. I can keep adding to it, but I also want some shadows in these areas. So I could take a darker color. I can sample what's already here, and I could take a darker color. Okay, so I can go from the middle out here and I can push this information back a little more down and back into that recess area. I can also shadow around these petals that are you know, in the back. I can scale this I'm using a soft brush now, and I can scale that down and get just the edges. So I can round them out that way. I won't do a whole lot of that, but it's something I could do. I can get the back plane change of this petal right there. It's just like that. Nothing too dramatic, but just another way too, if you look at it without that versus with that, it just gives a little bit more depth. And again, I would probably be careful not to take that too far. It's, again, one of those effects that you could probably overdo. You could probably get some of that in the middle, again, as we mentioned, throughout the process, this area is kind of a divot, right? Dips in, so we could get a little shadow in there as well. And on and on it goes. So we'll go ahead and stop right here. We'll head over to the next lesson and finish up the color. So with that, let's move on. 9. Final Details: Welcome back. Now, another thing, and I probably should have did this sooner, but it's something that really does help when you're coloring is to get a background color in pretty quickly. So again, I probably should have started that sooner, but I'm just going to drop in some soft blue like that. And immediately it, you know, helps the colors pop a little bit more. It gives you a better representation of what you're actually doing as well, color wise, so yeah. Start there. It's always a good idea. And so now I'll do the center area. Center stem. I don't the flowering part I don't know what that's called. I should know. And so here, I just sort of want to spruce this up a little bit. It feels a bit like you could just look better about that. But So let's see here. Add a little bit more color to this. We can see that we pull up a little tighter for you. It's maybe a little bit more of a purple. Kind of down into here. Just to shadow it a bit. Something like that. And then a little bit more of a lighter color light source through the middle and maybe just use that as a bit of texture on the very edge, but this is, again, I don't know if this makes a world of difference. It's just, just kind of put it in there and see what it looks like and maybe blend that just a little bit. Yeah, I think I like that. Okay, so now with the green portion, and really, this is all on the same layer. I'm not trying to do anything real advanced. As I mentioned, I probably could have did that all the way through. It's not a big deal when you're only applying minimal effects. And so, with this area, I'll grab a little bit more of a yellowish green and just try to get a little bit more of a light source going here. Something like that. A little bit here. I could try to be very specific as far as, like, getting the edging just right and this and that. I'm not. I feel like if it just has a little bit of implications of light versus being too awfully flat and boring, I feel like that's enough for this. So I'm not trying to be too awfully critical about. So there we go. It just makes it look a little more interesting. And I picked a pretty bright yellow, like, so something that kind of pops really heavily. So I could probably soften it up even more than this and be happy with it. So there we go, something like that. And now I will take a little bit more of a green. I could probably even go into green blue. Like a lot of times shadows will have a bit of blue in there. But I'm just going to take that green. I think I lock the layer. So by locking the layer, it doesn't paint outside of that initial green, and I'm going to go a bit darker. Just get some feeling of shadow to these areas. And then lastly, I will probably take down try to take down the saturation just a little bit. A lot of times I tend to be oversaturated, and usually, I can make it look a little better by pulling that back. Now, another thing you can do is you can actually undersaturate or desaturate something. And if you create a secondary layer of it, you can desaturate the top one or bottom, and you can erase them back and forth to control the areas. There's other ways to do it, but it's a neat way to sort of add saturation where you want because saturation, like other aspects of the work can also still be a focal point. So it's pretty effective way, actually, to control the focal point. Obviously, with layers, you can play around with how much of this is super visible, right? So if I turn the opacity back on this layer, then maybe that looks a little bit more natural where here, it's kind of strong. But a lot of times I'll just go back to this stage of the work, and I'll just keep smudging it around. And again, I can paint back and forth through this process to kind of zero in on how much texture I want to see. Especially since I added that shadow after the fact, you really don't want the light source into the shadow area, right? You sort of need to balance that out a bit. But at this stage of the work, I generally will keep adding and, you know, really playing around with this. There's a lot you can do at this particular part of the work. It's all laid in, it's all there in front of you. But you can definitely keep adding to it and making it your own. Likewise, with areas like this bit of the flower, I, you know, obviously, you know, keep adding to that, right? I could make the tip of this real pretty and make different choices that really bring your eye to that part, like a stronger highlight through the middle, more color, maybe even to the very edge of it. Let me see. I think, I've got that locked. But what I could do is I could add even a bit of drawing over the linework a little bit. So I got to bring that one up. Sometimes that can be a neat effect. But again, it becomes a little bit more of a focal point, but, you know, that can be a nice way to spruce it up. And let me see. I think I want to soften up this highlights just a tad. And then finally, we can add another bit of light right to the very edge. And so sometimes I'll like this, sometimes I won't, but we'll just try it. So we can add a more dominant light right to the very edge to kind of punch this up. So I'm just going to add it here here. And again, like I mentioned before, we got to be careful not to just throw this everywhere because it looks cool. You just really want it to affect certain areas, and you can go overboard with this really easy. So less is more. Pick and choose your battles, all that good stuff. Maybe a little bit right here. Because if I had my way, I would add it to every left portion of this drawing, and then I would regret it, right? So, something like that. No, I feel like I just feel like there could be a tiny bit right here. I'm gonna try it. But this is probably my against my better judgment. Oh, it's tough 'cause I actually think I kind of like that. Now, a lot of times I will add little things like that and then come back the next day and go, Oh, what did I do? Why did I share that work? So just FYI. But there's times I don't. There's times I add it, and I really like it, and I'm glad I put it in there. So you just have to test it out and then ask your friends, right? So yeah, something like that. And the light source can go into the texture, by the way. I would put it more heavily, you know, more dominant on the very edge, but it can go into the texture and take on some of that shape. Show you know what I mean, right here, right? Because light kind of has that ability to roll into the neighboring forms, and it generally looks more natural when you do that. So just keep that in mind versus, you know, you don't want one continuous straight line down the side of something. It sort of sort of kills it. Flattens it flattens it out, I should say. Alright, there it is. So I'm going to stop here because I could keep going on and on and then maybe take it too far. You can let me know what you think. You could probably take I guess I'll show you one final thing. You could probably take the difference of the petals. So what I'm going to do here is just grab the stem here, and I'm just going to darken it. Again, these Tools are in pretty much every software. I'm just going to drop the saturation just a little bit and the luminosity and just make it a little bit darker. Just that little bit of variance, so it's not all the same bright green. But, yeah, that's really it. So I really hope you enjoyed this series of videos. I would love to see your work. And if you have any questions for me, I'm here to answer and here to help. So thank you so much for watching this class. Good luck with your art, and more on the way soon. Bye for now.